Baby Driver, after

I can't believe it lived up to the hype.

Baby Driver opens with a car chase you've already seen most of in the trailers, but it's still glorious when viewed all in a single sequence. That 180-in-180-out - one of my two favorite stunts in the whole film (the other is the tire shredder) - is cut a fraction shorter than I'd have liked but there's probably a technical reason for that.

Edgar Wright gets a lot of credit - deservedly - for his rapid editing and propulsive montages, but Baby Driver also has some great long single-take(?) sequences. The action-packed opening chase is followed by a multi-minute shot tracking Baby as he buys coffee for his accomplices (I'm 99% sure I spotted a Pierce Brosnan cameo), and there are a couple of others that are just as confidently executed.

And Baby Driver also takes Wright well outside of his established comedy wheelhouse - there's palpable danger hanging in the air between Baby and [spoiler] late in the film. Shaun's finale had dramatic weight, but this is a whole other level. Which isn't to say that Baby Driver isn't funny in places, but you might be disappointed if you're expecting a Hot Fuzz-style comedy.

My pre-movie concerns about the employment of women in the film stand validated, though - they just don't have any real agency and in this day and age that's a poor state of affairs. Reviews have called Baby Driver a love letter to cinema and music but I'm a little frustrated Wright doesn't get as inventive narratively as he does visually. Enough remixes - give us an original composition!

Baby Driver is the best there is at what it does, but what it doesn't is impossible for me to ignore completely.

Baby Driver, before

I'm writing this before I go to see Baby Driver (this should be posted just as it starts) because I want to get these ideas down before watching the film changes how I think about them.

I've rewatched all of Edgar Wright's feature output in the last fortnight, and even if I hadn't I'd be an easy target for Baby Driver. There's little doubt in my mind that he's the best action director working today (in the West certainly), and I've been on the edge of my seat for Baby Driver ever since the synopsis dropped.

But I'm very aware of my own hype for this film. I'm so caught up in the positive reviews - which I've not even read any of in detail, the buzz just feels inescapable - that I'm half waiting for the sword to fall and half imagining how and how much I'm going to be enthusing about after I've seen it. Hype is giving way to a cold animal fear that it can't live up to the rumbling positivity, and my brain is stuck on one particular angle.

All of Wright's films suffer from a dearth of strong women. The women in his films are almost all (or are they all?) sidekicks, or girlfriends, or girlfriends' mates, or maybe antagonists (but not the Big Bad). Baby Driver looks set to continue this trend, with the female lead both the protagonist's girlfriend and very probably a damsel in distress. She's even a waitress, for God's sake - basically movie shorthand for "I need a man to save me from my own existence".

Wright excels at employing tropes, but rarely subverts them (beyond transplanting American clichés to unprepared English idylls).

Is there a reason Baby has to be a guy? Couldn't Mozart in a gokart be a woman? I'm trying to think of something in the plot that would prevent a gender swap, but all I'm coming up with is that this is what the genre demands and that's just… not good enough.

Shin Godzilla (2016)

Shin Godzilla, Hideaki Anno and Shinji Higuchi's 2016 update of maybe the most famous monster franchise in the world, is the series' most overtly satirical entry. It's also arguably the funniest, and much like Gareth Edwards' 2014 installment has gone straight to my top 3 - almost just for its atomic breath, which is the best in the franchise (as well as the most destructive).

In 1954, Godzilla was a warning symbol come to giant, rubbery life. Given the source of its powers, the common reading of the King of the Monsters as a specifically anti-nuclear reaction is really just a result of the atomic bomb as the only weapon of mass destruction the world had seen (yet). The Dr Serizawa subplot - and specifically its resolution - paint a broader warning about the misuse of science for destructive ends. (It's hard to think of a non-violent application for the Oxygen Destroyer, but Serizawa spends much of the film debating whether he should share the technology even to save his country.)

It's harder to draw a specific parallel for the role of the big G in Shin Godzilla. Really, the film is an idictment of the sluggish reactions of Japanese bureaucracy to disasters. The film opens with an increasingly ridiculous series of meetings about forming committees to hold meetings about dealing with what is, initially, a minor incident. When Godzilla does eventually appear on-screen, its rapidly-mutating powers instantly outpace the govermnent - whose eventual response is far too little, much too late. Tokyo is devastated around them while bureaucrats wring their hands about departmental responsibility.

There's an argument to be made that this Godzilla represents a much more modern threat - its sudden, devastating emergence and subsequent disappearance, coupled with its evolving capabilities, bring to mind terrorism. The origin of the monster - a side-effect of short-sighted convenience - could be an analogue for any number of Western governments' ill-advised meddling which resulted in a devastating, agressive response.

But this doesn't really hold up in the slightly saggy back half of the film, which loses a lot of the forward momentum that builds during and in the aftermath of Godzilla's emergence. A race between American nuclear bombers and a scientific effort to freeze the monster by cooling its blood is oddly airless, as it's mostly carried out by mid-level aides call in political favours to delay the US military response.

At the end, very little is resolved. The frozen body of Godzilla still looms over Tokyo, with the American countdown merely paused. For all the politicians' ambitious for their own future political glory, Tokyo is left in the shadow of its imminent destruction, and ultimately the people of Japan don't seem to have much say in the matter.

Ghost in the Shell preview

The opening four-and-a-half minutes of the upcoming Ghost in the Shell live-action movie was released on Twitter today, and… I'm not particularly impressed.

ICYMI: watch an extended clip from #GhostintheShell from the beginning of the movie. pic.twitter.com/pk2YVOkqlL

— Paramount Pictures (@ParamountUK) March 22, 2017

First, the good stuff: it looks pretty nice, if less grimy than the source material, and there are some great designs - the robo-spider geisha is incredible.

The rest feels very wide of the mark.

Broadly speaking, this clip follows a similar template to the first scene of Mamoru Oshii's 1995 anime film: the Major drops off a roof and engages is a brief firefight through a window. But the anime's opening four minutes set up a lot of stuff for the rest of the movie. the opening shot pans through layers of data illustrating wordlessly the extent to which everything is connected to the network; we're given hints of the rivalry between Public Security Sections 6 and 9; they namedrop Project 2501, the ultimate antagonist of the film; the surgical (and lethal) tactics of Section 9 get demonstrated; and while we're only really introduced to the Major there's also dialogue with Batou and Togusa that sketches out their working relationships.

By comparison, the live-action scene doesn't even seem to have a reason for the Major to be on that rooftop (one of a few things that leads me to believe that this isn't actually the very first scene in the film). While she begins the clip by announcing, "I'm on site," the presence of surveillance equipment seems to surprise her, and she's even unaware of who in the building might be the target. Where the live-action film has her responding to an unforeseen event, the anime makes the Major herself the event - which may seem like a small change, but moving them from active to reactive participants fundamentally alters the audience's perception of both Kusanagi and Section 9.

The relatively bloodless gunfight in the live-action film may be more visually inventive than its anime counterpart, but the number of cuts before the Major comes through the window - followed immediately by slow-motion wallrunning and a ponderous examination of the scene - makes the scene feel much longer.

Maybe the most surprising thing is the decision not to rip off maybe the most iconic shot of the anime's opening sequence: the first demonstration of the Major's thermoptic camouflage. On the one hand they've already lifted quite a lot of the original's key moments, but to draw the line at this feels weirdly restrained.

Everything I've seen of the live-action Ghost in the Shell puts me off it - the most egregious marketing error is the decision to use a san-serif font on the logo - but somehow I'm intrigued to see the final product, no matter how much I can already tell it's going to infuriate me.

London Has Fallen

There are just enough over-the-top Americanisms in the London Has Fallen for my brain to struggle with Poe's Law.

The casual disregard with which a wedding is blown up by a barely-teenaged pilot half a world away, orders given based on intelligence gathered by a different country. Gerard Butler's now-infamous "go back to Fuckheadistan or wherever you come from" line, which in more capable directorial hands would be a deliberate indictment of the US military's indifference to the targets of its drones. US president Benjamin Asher's chest-puffing delivery of Agent Smith's "the sound of inevitability" line from The Matrix, where the approaching subway train is instead Butler's unstoppable Secret Service agent Mike Banning, a brick shithouse who fires profane one-liners almost as often as bullets but whose face washes blank with every kill. Morgan Freeman's closing speech which is so on-the-nose that its horrifying justification for US interventionism is "do it for our children", delivered atop a patriotic orchestral swell.

The terrorist leader is ultimately executed in a drone strike almost identical to the one which opened the film, which he escaped and which served as his entire motivation, suggesting that the United States has learned nothing from the experience.

Despite the constant culling of sidekicks (anybody who spends more than a minute and a half with Banning and Asher seems to end up dead) and enemies, there is no tension to the film. When the President is captured by the terrorists (who have, in two short years managed to plan and organise a large-scale infiltration of the Metropolitan Police and Queen's Guard, plan and carry out a secret assassination on the British Prime Minister and orchestrate the simultaneous assassinations of every world leader attending his funeral), the film places a ticking clock on his head, counting down to his supposed execution but obvious rescue.

Banning is never in the slightest danger. The most ambitious action scene in the movie, an alleyway shootout faked into a single long take, features easily a half dozen deaths of SAS soldiers on Banning's side, gunned down by enemy fire while Banning himself saunters unscathed from cover to cover. The American is impervious to bullets while his allies are bullet-sponge sacrifices to be made in his unceasing mission to save one man - and when he manages to free the President from his captors Banning gives a speech about how the United States is greater than a single man.

This is a sick, brutal sociopath of a movie, an oddly clinical parade of gunshots and stabbings that seems more curious about violence and its effects on the human head than excited by it. It's a snuff film made for the audience to revel in, but London Has Fallen itself isn't getting anything out of this exercise - there's no… joy in it.

It has no clear politics, it has no message or lesson or even point to its violence. I cannot see any reason for this film to have been made.

Rogue One

I want to talk about AT-ATs.

There are a lot of other things I love about the trailer for Gareth Edwards' upcoming Star Wars spin-off Rogue One: the grounded aesthetic that harkens back to the original film's "lived-in" universe; the shots of Jyn that bookend the trailer, one in cuffs on a Rebel Base, one disguised in the Death Star cell blocks; the use of handheld cameras that give it a more personal feeling than we're used to from the series; Mon Mothma's smirk at Jyn's "I rebel" joke.

But I want to talk about AT-ATs, because the way Edwards uses them in this one brief shot at the end of the Rogue One trailer says a lot about why I'm excited for his take on this universe.

The best film in the Star Wars saga (so far) is The Empire Strikes Back, which is also the first place we saw Imperial Walkers.

During the Battle of Hoth, a number of these barely-mobile artillery platforms attacked the rebel base on Hoth, targeting it's shield generators. Impressive in scale but lumbering, they didn't seem to pose much of a threat to troops on the ground, and were eventually defeated using ropes.

It's difficult to see them as scary, mostly (I believe) because of the way they're shot.

Gareth Edwards, for my money, made the best Godzilla movie since the 1954 original (this is a hill I'm prepared to die on - fight me, scrubs).

Few other directors are as good at communicating scale as effectively as Edwards; even as blockbusters ramp up the "disaster porn", they get more and more clinical about it. We're watching cities being ruined, but it all lacks dramatic weight because the scale isn't relatable.

Edwards always puts his camera ona very human level; the kaiju in Godzilla are almost always shown with known objects in the foreground or through a bus window, which tells you immediately just how terrifyingly huge these things are. He avoids putting you on Godzilla's eye level because that makes the buildings look small rather than making the monsters look big, which would diminish the awe.

Sorry, I'm supposed to be taking about AT-ATs.

It's a very short part of the Rogue One trailer - Jyn and her band of rogues are running across an open battlefield; at first we can only see the lower legs of the Imperial Walkers, but the camera pans up just in time to show the lead AT-AT turn towards (and open fire on) the ground troops.

That's exciting, in a way the AT-ATs never were before. They're a threat to infantry, not just infrastructure. Instead of walking slowly towards a target on auto-fire, waiting to trip, these machines are reactive - and they react fast.

Rogue One has taken these walking punchlines - big, slow, expensive and easily-defeated - and done something unexpected: it's made them dangerous.

Into Darkness

This is going to go into spoiler territory for Star Trek Into Darkness, so consider yourself warned.

John Dies at the End

I could've sworn this film was much older than it is; Wikipedia says it was only released in the US in December last year, but I swear I remember seeing the first trailer for it long before that. It still hasn't had a proper UK release, but the DCA had a preview screening last Friday as part of the Dundead horror festival thing.

I don't know what I was expecting, exactly, but John Dies at the End isn't it. It's one of those films where its component parts seem like a recipe for greatness, but it somehow never pulls everything together. It's brilliantly shot, the dialogue is sharp and brilliantly delivered, and it has a core idea - a narcotic drug called "soy sauce" that gives people clairvoyance and the ability to see and communicate with the dead - that's full of promise.

It never really goes anywhere though, at least metaphorically; the characters literally go to an alternate dimension at one point but it feels like an attempt to up the stakes in a conflict we've not heard much about. The film opens with a ghostbusting endeavour undertaken by the two main characters - unreliable narrator David and the eponymous John - but then jumps into flashback for its entire running time with their (for want of a better term) origin story.

I'd have preferred a full film of low-tech paranormal investigations. It might have been less original, but it couldn't have been less coherent.

Iron Man 3

We saw Iron Man 3 last night; it was really quite good. Not sure there's much else to say about it - there's not a whole lot of subtext or deep character stuff to go into. The CGI was remarkably low-key, considering the big explosive effects finale; there was only one shot, that I can remember anyway, that didn't look up to scratch.

It was also, thankfully, not as indulgent as I was expecting for a third-in-the-franchise superhero film. They tend to get a bit bloated and drag in more villains than the plot can comfortably support, but it seems Iron Man got that out of its system with its second outing.

I've been thinking about what Iron Man 2's flaw was, for me; I've still only seen it once and might re-evaluate it in the event I ever give it a second viewing, but I remember it feeling like a movie version of a TV show. It's got all the big-budget spectacle of a blockbuster, but it's trying not to upset the cart with any story or character beats because they want to save that for the next one. As a result, it's treading water to an extent - there's lots of splashing, but it doesn't go anywhere.

Talent and ambition versus failure

I was reading an article earlier today which collected a number of choice quotes from Roger Ebert's most negative reviews - the films he really hated, and got really creative expressing that hatred. One quote in particular stood out to me, from his review of the Robin Williams/Ed Norton/Jon Stewart "comedy" Death to Smoochy:

Only enormously talented people could have made "Death to Smoochy." Those with lesser gifts would have lacked the nerve to make a film so bad, so miscalculated, so lacking any connection with any possible audience. To make a film this awful, you have to have enormous ambition and confidence, and dream big dreams.

The film industry is full of well-intentioned failures made by talented people. Some of them are successful, some are not, but even in this scathing takedown of Death to Smoochy Ebert has to admit the talent and ambition of the people behind it, even if the end result is a total disaster.

Which got me thinking: are there any videogames that could be described similarly, or are the huge teams and vague ownership of ideas constructed in such a way that intent and even talent is difficult to identify if a game is bad?

And not even "so bad it's good", where the enjoyment comes from a place not deliberately targeted by the development team. Just a game that fails on every level but still has a spark of ambition in it. Where you can see the talent struggling to make a connection.

This probably comes down, in a lot of cases, to the lack of singular vision on a project compared to the director's final authority on a film. There are so few auteur videogame directors, possibly because the disciplines required to direct and design a game are so broad that they can't be as hands-on with every aspect as a film's director.

Directing a two-hour feature is one thing; directing an eight, twelve or forty-hour game is another entirely, and it's going to be exponentially difficult to make sure you've got your eye on everything.

You're going to need a bigger boat

Stumbled across Jaws on SyFy tonight - certainly one of the higher-quality films they've got in their roster. I was surprised, when I saw it on the EPG, that it was actually the original; I was expecting it to be some high-numbered, low-quality sequel. They still managed to break up a lot of the tension with ad breaks, although it was far from an ITV hatchet job.

The last time I saw Jaws was at the cinema; the Odeon in Dundee was showing it a few months ago and I'd never actually seen it the whole way through before then. The first shark attack is ridiculously dragged-out - in fact they're all a bit melodramatic - but it's a phenomenal film. Even if it doesn't get really special until Brody, Hooper and Quint are out on the Orca.

If it wasn't for Robert Shaw, Richard Dreyfuss would steal the whole show; Hooper's squeamish but determined approach to autopsies (both human and shark) is perfect, and would be hilarious if it wasn't so totally serious. I always feel like I'm being a little bit harsh on Roy Scheider in this; he's playing a more or less ordinary guy, and aside from the fear of water he doesn't have the eccentricities that make Hooper and Quint so interesting to watch.

The standout scene for me, though, hangs entirely on Shaw. Quint's story about his shipwrecked crew is mesmerising. Told so simply and straightforwardly, almost daring Brody and Hooper to feel sorry for him.

It's something of a pity that the finale is so literally explosive; there's relatively little action for most of the running time, so the final shark attack on the Orca is a bit out of place. The majority of the film hides the shark and focuses on the people, so when the monster finally does appear properly the film loses a little bit of what makes it really fun to watch.

Why, she wouldn't even harm a fly

I was going to watch the second episode of Bates Motel tonight, but since I've... acquired a copy of Hitchcock's film since watching the pilot, I decided I should probably watch it before getting too far into the TV prequel¹.

There are a number of things that surprised me about it. Firstly was Anthony Perkins, whose performance as Norman Bates is just miles ahead of everybody else in the cast. They all feel like stage actors performing, but Perkins just is Bates, all nervous ticks and charm and anger. I remember being impressed with him the last time I saw (the first half of) Psycho, but I'd forgotten how much he inhabits the role.

Second was the dialogue - while some of it was a bit clunky and This Is Exposition, there are some very modern exchanges (or maybe it's just that Perkins delivers it so well). I'm not entirely sure what I was expecting; more formal language and rigid exchanges, maybe? One thing that did strike me was the overwrought explanation from the psychiatrist at the end - maybe five decades of thriller and horror movies since has spoiled a current audience, but I felt a little bit condescended to by his spelling out every element of the twist.

I'd also forgotten how beautiful a black-and-white film can look when it's shot right. Catherine described it as "colourful", which seems oxymoronic, but you can almost see the hues leaking into the picture even though it's all just different shades of grey.

I'm not sure I'd have enjoyed Psycho so much if it wasn't for Norman Bates, though. Knowing the reveal before it happens can be the death of a thriller unless it's well-made and -acted, and despite the production values I'm not sure there's enough to hold my interest without Perkins' performance. I was kind of bored by any scene he wasn't in.

¹ There are a few continuity errors between the film's account of Norman's childhood and the TV show's, as well as some minor (but interesting and possibly deliberate) differences with the layout of the house. I don't think it's going to be problematic for the show though, since it's obviously set "now", rather than pre-1960.

Excuse me, who are you?

The day after I first saw Perfect Blue I went to HMV and bought a copy on VHS. Over the next few months, I watched it a couple of times a week, and I'm pretty sure I've seen it over a hundred times.

Yesterday I found myself at a loss and figured I'd give it another look - it's been, I'm sure, three or four years since I last saw it. I'd recently downloaded a Blu-ray rip (I've bought it on VHS and twice on DVD; if there's a UK Blu-ray release I'll be all over that, so I figure I can justify this) and hadn't gotten around to checking the quality yet.

Some of it hasn't aged well. The quality of the animation is pretty good, although there are some really sloppy scenes and in more than a couple of places you can see where the artists have coloured outside the lines. The character design for ME-MANIA has always bugged me (I think it would be more effective if he was an otherwise normal person), but I'd never noticed before the similarities between his eyes and Rumi's.

I'd usually watched the dub before (it was the only option I had on VHS), but I did notice a couple of places where the translation loses some impact. Mima's line in the TV show, "who are you?" ("anata dare nano?") is translated in the dub to "excuse me, who are you?" in order to match the flaps. Obviously she can't hysterically scream "excuse me" when chasing down her hallucinations, so the line isn't repeated throughout the film in English the way it is in Japanese.

I'm glad to see the creepiness holds up, though. It builds tension and then cuts away, leaving you disoriented and unsure what actually happened, and if it happened at all. I'm still unsure about the "real" events in a couple of places, even having seen the film so often. The film uses sex and nudity more than is probably strictly necessary, but it's almost always shot and scored to make you uneasy (I'm sure there's a lot to be read into this apparent fear of the female form) rather than as fanservice. It's also a little surprising to see a film with no male lead - Mima gets through the whole ordeal entirely on her own.

Cloud Atlas

I have, as near as I can tell, a first-edition hardcover copy of Cloud Atlas sitting next to me. It was the second David Mitchell book I bought (after Ghostwritten), and the third I owned (I got number 9 dream as a gift). It was the last that I managed to actually get through (until The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet came out, anyway).

It's not difficult to admit that, initially, I didn't "get" it. Even though Ghostwritten and number 9 dream had played with nonlinear and nontraditional narratives to varying degrees, Cloud Atlas was a totally different beast. I didn't think much of The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing - and it's still my least favourite of the stories - and the way it cut off mid-sentence struck me as extremely odd. I don't think I made it far enough into Letters from Zedelghem on my first attempt to reach Frobisher's discovery of Ewing's journal - which causes that first chapter to make sense - so I abandoned it.

I can't remember exactly when I picked up the Kindle edition (Amazon can, however: January 1st, 2011), but I'm pretty sure it was around the time that the film adaptation was announced. A few blog posts mentioned the nested matryoshka structure which piqued my interest again, and I stuck through Ewing and Frobisher's opening chapters to get to Luisa Rey, where everything started to click.

Tonight, we saw the film version at the DCA, and I'm still decompressing.

Some of it was brilliant. While the Wachowski version of Nea So Copros (imaginatively renamed "Neo Seoul") doesn't really look how I imagined it, it is stunning. The way O-hawaii is shot in Zachry's story is gorgeous - as, in fact is the whole thing. There's no question it's a technical masterpiece.

Some of the story changes bug me, though - more than they should. The biggest one is giving Zachry the comet birthmark; in the novel it's Meronym who has it. If that doesn't seem like a big story point to get hung up on, it's not - I can't really explain why it bothers me. The Frobisher story, which I was never really fond of anyway, has been more or less completely gutted and rebuilt; Ayrs' daughter Eve has been completely excised from the plot and the whole thing is transplanted from Holland to Edinburgh (although this does allow Cavendish's story to visit the same house a few decades later). A lot of the Chatham Isles stuff has been cut from Ewing's story, which doesn't really have much plot impact but makes the friendship between Ewing and Dr. Goose seem even more peculiar.

The Luisa Rey, Cavendish and Sonmi stories are more or less complete though, and I think I found the first two more interesting than I did in the book. An Orison of Sonmi-451 and Sloosha's Crossin' an' Ev'rythin' After are my two favourite chapters of the book, and I'm glad they were kept mostly intact - even if Sonmi's is simplified a lot in places for time.

And with a running time of nearly three hours, it's probably for the best that liberties were taken with the slower parts of the book; the emotional beats are all pretty well intact, although the point of the story is probably overstated. It takes a while to get going as well; I thought the early scenes were very exposition-heavy, which is probably necessary when you're setting up six different stories with six different casts set across a thousand years of human history but still feels clumsy.

It has definitely inspired me to re-read the book, though; I'm sure there's a lot of stuff I've missed previously. The last time I read number 9 dream I spotted another link to the overall Mitchell universe, so I'm sure Cloud Atlas still has a lot to find.

In a more perfect world, I like to think Cloud Atlas would have gotten a 12-episode TV series; the first half of the first five stories, two episodes for Sloosha's Crossin', and then the closing parts of the stories in reverse order.

I'm holding out hope for a Ghostwritten series with that approach. Come on, HBO - don't let me down.

Repeated viewings

A quick one to try and get in under the 12 o'clock (self-imposed) deadline, which I've already missed on a couple of occasions anyway but backdated so that nobody would notice except now I'm telling you about it.

We caught the second halves of a couple of movies on TV tonight - Ghostbusters II and Kill Bill Part 1 and despite having seen them both many times over I got distinctly different things from them than I expected.

For Ghostbusters II, I'd forgotten or maybe just never noticed how sinister it is. The first film has its fair share of peril, but it's an impersonal evil. In the sequel, Dana Barrett is being deliberately targeted, and Janosz' single-minded obsession with her is downright creepy. It probably doesn't help my impression, however, that I had honest-to-God nightmares about the ghost nanny Janosz when the film came out. Peter MacNicol has weirded me out ever since.

What stuck out in Kill Bill was a bit more subtle, and really only changes a single scene: the fight between The Bride and O-ren Ishii, right at the end of the film. My memory of The Bride generally is that she's very capable and confident, and I don't remember any of the fights causing her any great concern - even though Gogo is difficult to beat, The Bride doesn't hesitate.

But when she's facing O-ren in the garden, even before O-ren draws her sword, there's an anxiousness to The Bride's movements. Even O-ren seems to be regretting the situation, and the jibe about being unable to fight like a samurai - and subsequent apology - feels like this is a much more personal fight for both than the film ever spells out.

Of course, maybe it's because O-ren is the first member of the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad that The Bride fights - she's not had to test her abilities against anybody so skilled in a long time, and after the Crazy 88 she isn't at her peak.

This is why I like rewatching films, though. Even if you've seen something a dozen times, there's always more to get out of it - although in this case, I could just be overthinking it.

On The Onion and offence

Update: The Onion has posted an apology, which I believe is genuine. I still think the original tweet was brilliant satire, but there's no doubt they'd have had a much stronger position if the tweet had used the name of an actor who's definitely old enough to understand the joke that's being told with their name in it.

Original post:

There's not much way I'm going to get through this without quoting, and using, some pretty strong language - so if that's a problem for you, turn away now.

The facts: during the Oscar broadcast last night, the following Tweet was posted by The Onion.

I didn't know who Quvenzhané Wallis is, so for anyone interested here's her Wikipedia article; the short version is that she's a nine-year-old nominated for Best Actress for her role in Beasts of the Southern Wild.

Now, some people have taken issue with The Onion's tweet. Personally I think it's top-tier satire, biting and uncomfortable and hilarious, but a lot of reaction on Twitter seems to be centred around the fact that people have forgotten that The Onion is a comedy site. The root of the problem is that people have assumed that The Onion means everything it ever says.

Remember how hard we all collectively laughed when North Korea made that mistake? Do they believe The Onion's other Oscar night coverage, that Kathryn Bigelow really wore Osama bin Laden's blood-stained clothes to the ceremony and Daniel Day Lewis really thinks that Abraham Lincoln deserved to die?

The offensive nature of this tweet seems to be in three parts: firstly that it's criticism levelled at someone who doesn't deserve it; secondly that it's directed at a child; and finally that it's used the word "cunt". The problem with those first two points is twofold, but recognising that also requires you to understand who, exactly, the Onion was actually satirizing with their tweet. It seems pretty clear to me that the tweet was a response to the kind of snide, spiteful gossip that goes on whenever there's a red-carpet event; reporters and style columnists ganging up on people more famous and rich than themselves to pick apart their every flaw by way of slagging off their miscalculated eveningwear. The entertainment press is built on a foundation of criticising people who don't deserve it, and also focuses uncomfortable attention on children (a lot of whom aren't famous in their own right, but are stalked because of their association with a famous parent).

The Onion, in response to this fairly widely accepted practice, tweeted a similarly unfounded and non-specific but excessively profane complaint about someone that nobody in their right mind could believe. It's so over the top and baseless that surely anybody with two brain cells to rub together can see that there is no way it could be a genuine opinion. Apparently not.

But that brings us to point 3 on the "reasons to get pissy about a website calling someone a cunt" - the word "cunt" itself. If they'd called her a bitch or a skank or any one of a dozen other baseless profanities, it's much more likely that it could be read as a genuine opinion. But the heart of a lot of The Onion's satire is taking things to the extreme, being deliberately provocative. By calling this nine-year-old the worst thing they could possibly think of, they were trying to point out the broader undercurrent of aggressive jealousy and baseless judgement that makes up a depressingly high percentage of Oscar coverage.

Could they have made their point with a less offensive word, or directed at an older actor? Possibly, but it's hard to imagine it would have had the same impact as the one they did make. My only concern at the content of the tweet is that it would get back to Quvenzhané, she's not old enough to understand the satirical meaning and it affects her negatively. Making a child the subject of the tweet this way is uncomfortably close to the celebrity-child fixation of the media outlets being satirized.

The Onion has removed the original tweet and, as far as I know, have not followed up with an explanation or apology, so I'm ascribing intent to their original post based on my own perspective. I'm hoping that they do provide the reasoning behind it, because the worst thing that could come from this is a shut-down of the conversation.

Whoever had control of The Onion's Twitter account last night could genuinely have some kind of vendetta against a nine-year-old. But I doubt it.

You've had a break-in, Mr. Sykes.

Warning: minor spoilers for The Fugitive - although it's 20 years old this year, so it's close to the statute of limitations.

My favourite film changes pretty regularly depending on what I've (re-)watched most recently, or even what I've been reading or talking about - if I've seen a lot of anime recently then I'm liable to say Perfect Blue or some Ghibli or other, if I've been reading scifi then Alien is going to be high on the list. Tonight, my favourite film is The Fugitive.

I saw The Fugitive in the cinema. I would have only been ten, and watching it earlier tonight it struck me how much of it must have gone over my head. Not just the (overly-complicated) pharmaceutical conspiracy stuff, which I can't imagine myself having context for; even now there are bits of the dialogue I'm catching properly for the first time.

The best lines and scenes are all Tommy Lee Jones', but that's almost certainly just because he's got other characters to talk to. Harrison Ford spends most of the film looking tired, worried and angry (apart from the end where he looks tired, worried and relieved), and for the most part doesn't exchange more than a few words with anybody.

The exchanges between Kimble and Gerard, though - the tunnel at the dam and a phone conversation from the one-armed man's house - are brief but great, and actually do a lot to cement the characters' motivations. Gerard's "I don't care" line is an important one because it'd be easy to forget that his job isn't to solve a crime - it's just to catch the fugitive. It tells Kimble, and the audience, that his innocence or guilt is irrelevant and that Gerard won't be put off by any new evidence Kimble can find.

I don't think I have words or the time to praise Tommy Lee Jones' performance in this film enough, but the US Marshalls altogether are so natural, their back-and-forth jokes so easy, that I'm not sure how much of it was actually scripted. Given the seriousness of the story as a whole and the role of the Marshalls in it, they actually bring most of the levity that's present in the film.

There's not much I don't love about the film: the music's great, the dialogue is mostly pretty snappy (there are a couple of exposition-y flashbacks that creak a little), and I lost count of the number of times watching tonight where I said "this next bit's great!". Even though the pacing is odd, ramping up the tension in bursts - Kimble nearly gets caught and narrowly escapes at least three times - it flows remarkably well, with the stakes getting higher the closer he gets to the truth. The final explanation for the murder of Kimble's wife is a bit weak, but it's hard to imagine a random home invasion would have made for as compelling a search for the one-armed man.

DVD Obligation

On The Society, the forum that came up with the idea of trying to survive 2013 with as few gaming purchases as possible (ideally none, but in my case I'm allowing myself The Last of Us), the impetus for a lot of the participants was a backlog of games they'd bought previously but never managed to play. Some of the worst offenders include people who've yet to play BioShock or Grand Theft Auto IV.

I don't have much of a "stack"; while there are a few Dreamcast games that I've never gotten around to finishing, I'm pretty sure that ship has sailed. (I should probably get rid of a few of those, to be honest; I still have every Dreamcast game I ever bought.) I've been pretty good, this generation, about trading in titles that I've either not played or lost interest in rather than keeping them around, and have also been making a conscious effort to limit the amount of stuff I actually buy for a while - having a LoveFilm subscription that included games helped immensely on that front.

At the moment, I have more unwatched Blu-rays and DVDs than unplayed games; stuff I got for Christmas or my birthday, or just picked up at release. Most of them - Looper, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and Lockout - I saw in the cinema so it's not like I'm missing out completely on any big-hitters among them, but it seems like we're never in the mood for any of them.

Watching a film that happens to come on TV is one thing; there's no sense of commitment when you start watching and even less when you find one partway through. If I pick out a disc, though, I'm essentially agreeing to dedicate the next two hours (or more, in many cases) to that choice. It feels like weakness to have to pause or, worse, abandon it; you've got to have everything in place so you don't leave the sofa until the credits roll. Or is that just me?

I don't know why, but even watching a DVD of a TV series is different. I don't have the same sense of obligation when I've put in a disc of Futurama or Red Dwarf - and I'll often watch that for at least as long as a film would take. The episodic nature probably helps; thinking "I'll watch one more" is different to "I have another 30 minutes of this film to go before I can move".

I don't think I have a point in this, except I need to stop being such a wuss about watching films at home - or at least, about having to watch it all. Maybe just deciding to watch as much as I can would be the nudge I need to get into the story. There are a lot of films I'll hang around for once I get into them on TV - I should take that same approach to home media.

300

Shortly before Zack Snyder's adaptation of 300 came out in cinemas, I was having a conversation with someone about the film and, more broadly, the battle of Thermopylae. During the course of the discussion, I mentioned that the battle ends with most of the Spartans dying, which the other party got rather annoyed about. He seemed to think that I'd ruined the ending; I'm still of the opinion that - 2,500 years after the event - the statute of limitations had long since expired on that particular spoiler.

I mean, the whole point of the story - and the reason the battle is still talked about - is the nobility of sacrifice, doing what's right at the cost of your own life. I couldn't understand why someone would be interested in a film based (however loosely) on the real event but not have even a passing familiarity with it. They obviously hadn't read the comic either.

TCM are showing 300 at the moment, but I've had enough of it. The film bugs me in a dozen different ways, although most of those boil down the way Spartan society is presented - mostly the injection (by Miller, I assume) of some pretty aggressive misogyny - and the explanation by Leonidas of the phalanx, which his soldiers effectively abandon two minutes after the battle starts. I mean, if you're going to discount someone from fighting because they can't use a technique that you're not particularly bothered about anyway, I can see why Ephialtes takes the hump¹.

I suppose at the end of the day I can't hold too much of that against the film, though - if his Watchmen adaptation is anything to go by, I'm assuming 300 is an almost note-for-note retelling of the comic, which I haven't read and frankly don't have much compulsion to. I assume the only historical research done by Miller before writing the original was into the battle itself; I know that there are liberties taken with Spartan culture and can only wonder where the hell half the Persian stuff came from.

There are some tremendous lines in it though - even if the best ("then we shall fight in the shade") is apparently a genuine quote from one of the Spartans at the battle². But for every badass taunt and cool shot, there's just so much facepalming that I can't get past.

I remember reading up about Thermopylae a lot when the movie was first announced; maybe if I hadn't, the film wouldn't annoy me quite so much. I don't think it's even disappointment - I didn't know what to expect from the film - but it somehow feels disrespectful to the real thing to turn it into such a freak show. I'm sure the battle wasn't as honorable and glorious as the Greek historians of the time would have us believe, but it would have been pretty awesome without taking such massive liberties with the source material.

¹ I am so, so sorry. I couldn't resist, and then couldn't bring myself to edit it out.

² Probably my favourite line from the real thing didn't make it into the film; when Leonidas was leaving Sparta to fight, his wife - the unfortunately-named Queen Gordo - asked him what she should do if he didn't return. He replied, "marry a good man and bear good children". While it does seem to imply that her only purpose should be to produce more Spartans, I like the sense that he didn't feel like he had any ownership of her. I don't think he was giving her an order; he was telling her not to give up her own life just because he might lose his.

Welcome to the party, pal

Die Hard is the best action film ever made.

Hopefully that isn't a controversial statement. Certainly most people will consider it one of the best, but for me the are no other action movies that come close to John McClane's first outing. Except maybe his third¹.

There are probably a dozen reasons why Die Hard is so great. Chief among them is Alan Rickman's exceptional thief Hans Gruber; smart, witty and impeccably dressed, he's always looking at the bigger picture, at the end goal - any frustration with McClane's cowboy heroics is quickly dismissed as a distraction.

If the film was made today, I have a feeling Hans' true motives - which are openly stated in his conversation with Takagi right at the beginning of the Nakatomi incident - would be hidden even from the audience until much later². That might be a way to build tension, but the deliberate way that Hans manipulates the expectations of the LAPD and FBI elevates him from someone with unclear motives into a proper mastermind. He's got all these plates spinning, and we know it right from the beginning.

In fact, that's my favourite thing about Die Hard - all the major characters have a very clear goal that's motivating them. The overall story might not be the cleverest, but it doesn't assume that the audience is a bunch of gawping simpletons only interested in the next explosion. We know who John McClane is, what he does for a living and what his relationship with his wife is like. We like him before the shooting starts, and even if you're not actively rooting for him to get back together with Holly, you understand what his goal is and why it keeps him going when any sane person would try and escape.

I think the setting is a big fantasy fulfillment, too - unlike, say, Casey Ryback in Under Siege, John McClane doesn't have any special forces training or expert skills. He's not even especially fit or well-built. It's easy to leave the cinema thinking, "yeah, if that happened in my office I could totally take out the terrorists".

The overall message of the film - if you'll permit me to get a bit philosophical for a moment - is about facing a difficult situation head-on, rather than running or leaving it to someone else. It's why Al shoots Karl, even though he never wanted to touch a gun again: he's put in a situation where he has to protect himself and something he loves³, and he does it in the only way permissible in Die Hard.

By shooting the closest German.

¹ I actually think Die Hard With A Vengeance is my favourite of the series, but have to admit that the first film is objectively better.

² Like, for instance, in Die Hard With A Vengeance where - spoiler alert - Simon's entire bomb plot is a distraction from the bullion heist.

³ If you don't believe Die Hard's main love story is between Al Powell and John McClane, I suggest you watch their first scene together at the end of the film again.